About CRAFT’s Format and Editorial Guidelines

Mission, Focus and Theme

CRAFT’s mission is ‘practical hope’. This is achieved through publishing work that is primarily visual, can provide practical hope, is innovative, and developed within grounded practice in order to facilitate our reconciliation with Gaia. The focus of such critical practice is to include a significant ‘hands on’ component, as well as reprising and reflections thereon. In general, such praxis is based on a completed (exemplar) project – which actively seeks to demonstrate today that a better world is possible tomorrow for our children and planet. Each publication will have a theme around this focus.

Style guide and format guidelines

Referencing: All documents need references! Readers need to know where you got your information; they might want to follow it up themselves! There are no rules for this: just be consistent, and accessible to the reader. However, there are two preferred referencing styles.

Use footnotes. For each piece of information you want to reference, add a footnote, where you can state the source. This is recommended for shorter articles less than 2000 words. If you wish then to lead into a longer article by all means continue to use the footnote system therein

Use the Harvard style. Longer articles are recommended to use the Harvard system. For example: “Wildman (1996:26)” means page 26 of an article written by Wildman written in 1996. This is an example of a longer Harvard reference.

However, it is acceptable if you use your own consistent system.. You don’t have to change your referencing system for us.

Fonts: All fonts should be chosen so that any reviewer can read documents. Commonfonts like “Arial” and “Times New Roman” are acceptable. “Humorous” fonts like Comic Sans are not. Documents should use a minimum of 12 px. Consistency is also good. Otherwise, it doesn’t make much difference what font you use. Both the website and the eBook have their own customary font to represent your text.

Styles: Use styles such as “Heading 1” and “Heading 2” for headings. These styles aid you by making text more consistent, and thus making readers’ lives easier.

Paragraphs: Leave a blank line between paragraphs (but not two!) Use 1.5 spacing between lines.

Images: The standard picture types for websites are JPG, GIF and PNG. All are acceptable. BMP (Microsoft’s default) is not acceptable for several reasons, such as being too big in file size.

File format: Microsoft Word. We are fine with earlier “.doc” or later “.docx” formats. Please don’t use “.rtf”.

Spell-check: if possible, print the document and read the hard copy yourself. Afterwards, get someone else who doesn’t know the topic to read it in order for you then to make relevant readability changes.

Readability: After the last step, put your article through spell-check and grammar-check. (You may have to do it more than once). Please check your document’s readability via the Flesch-Kincaid readability stats and please aim for a grade score of 10-12. This will be explained how to do it below – see below for further explanation. If you do know how to do it, just imagine that you are writing for Readers Digest or your local paper.1

But wait – there’s more!

Punctuation is good: Here are some punctuation rules to help you.

Use only one or two spaces after each period, colon, or semi-colon.

When doing ‘…’ — you should use only 3 dots minimum and maximum.

When using dashes, use two in a row, i.e., ‘–’.

There is never a space before a period or before a comma.

Please don’t use running capitals in section headings: Just capitalise the first word.

Editorial guidelines

To be qualified for our site, your article:

Will need to be

An original article that you wrote: If you work for an author as an employee or contractor and are submitting the article, please ensure you have permission to do so and submit the article as was from the original author including his or her email address and name.

Informative, practical and share your unique expertise: Include tips, strategies, techniques, case-studies, analysis, opinions and commentary in your articles. We do not accept articles that contain more than 5 lines of quoted or sourced material.

Written in proper English: Use the spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization and sentence structure of the language. While we know there is a variation in what is considered ‘proper English,’ we ask that you at least be consistent within your article. Your article must also be proofed and double checked for accuracy. If English is your second language, we strongly suggest that you have it proofed by someone who has English as their native tongue before submitting your articles to us.

Written in Basic English for practical people: We suggest a vocab of 1000 with short sentences. If you intend to submit an academic article please do so and indicate same. Realise it will not be include in the main body of the eZine. We suggest a Flesch-Kincaid grade score of 10-12 with a maximum of 14. An F-K score of 8 means that an eighth grader could understand the document. Interestingly, this is equivalent to US school grade levels of around 15-17 years old2.

Must not be

An article you ripped-off from the public domain bought or paid someone to write. Do not waste your time or ours by buying article packs that have non-exclusive licenses as we reject those articles. Why do we do this? (1) It makes you look like a fraud because you’re putting your name on someone else’s works that already may have hundreds or thousands of other authors who already put their name on the exact same works and, (2) we do not want to clog up the system with more than one copy of any article in the system.

Encouraging of terrorism, bomb creation, support for terrorism/ radicalism/ religious fanaticism, illicit drugs or drug paraphernalia, steroid use or advocacy, weapon use or the promotion of hard alcohol/tobacco-related products inc. prescription drugs.

Promotional of yourself or particular products or services etc.

Written to contain any content that is a violation of any law, be considered defamatory, libellous, or infringes on the legal rights of others.

A parallel submission of the exact same article as one that you already submitted to us. Some authors have submitted the same article multiple times with only a few words changed in the body — we reject these and ban authors who engage in this practice.

Review process

Please note CRAFT is ‘Post-academic’ and NOT an academic publication, so authors will NOT get ANY kudos from any academic research program such as the Education Research Australia, the Research Quality Framework, or the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA)3.

CRAFT believes this laudable process has become completely derailed to the point where such research ‘brownie point’ systems now work against innovation, change and alternative views by simply reinscribing the status quo. In particular, such systems react against practitioner reflections being considered as ‘research’ and thus they act against initiatives such as ‘local knowledge’ local history, ‘grounded theory’, ‘local theory’, ‘artificer learning’ and so forth.

So while there is an ‘editorial board’– for want of a better term — it is not there to vet your work, or help you earn academic brownie points. Rather, it is there to mentor you as a practitioner and author. While it may take several iterations with the nominated member of the editorial board for your work to get published – just don’t give up. CRAFT is a voice for, and from, your practice and you will be heard.

Text to Screen

Remember, CRAFT also hopes to respect the transition from text to screen. Please include wherever possible visual representations of your work such as a few photos per article would be appreciated. Finally, a paragraph and contact details and photo of you will also be required.

Sustainability Issues

CRAFT is, from its very initiation – Virtual, Visual and we hope Visionary in terms of humble practical hope. No trees will be killed in its production. The eZine however has the capacity to produce its contents in eBook format for use in – say – areas of the South developing in the North as well as Africa and other countries with unreliable internet connections. For us we prefer the concept of ‘creactive evolvablity’ or ‘CRAFT’ to sustainability. Both Jim and I have taken our own personal steps in this direction. I ride a pushbike where-ever I can, we have solar panels, a tank and I grow some of my own veges with hydroponics and Biochar.

Legal Status of your published work

Please note CRAFT is Not For Profit, Public Domain and Global Commons so that, once published, you and others may use your work elsewhere as you/they see fit – your gift to the global commons as it were. This means others will be free to use your work so long as they give you bibliographic credit therefore. CRAFT is NOT about setting you up as an author as per Google ranking or expert nor is it designed to establish any propriety knowledge or practice. Rather it is here to help Gaia. This is the new paradigm one which we both commit to. However we are only a part of a bigger picture of activists seeking to move beyond the status quo – yet respect what is wise therein as we fumble and even stumble towards a better world for our children and our planet.

Publisher

The organiser and publisher of the eZine is ourselves in good faith and a demonstration of our good will, through Prosperity Press and its allocated ISBN’s – we accept responsibility for the strengths and weaknesses of our production. With your help it can be improved.

Acknowledgements

CRAFT seeks to ensure acknowledgement is given wherever relevant. If you have not been recognised, or if there is a mistake in same, please let us know and will immediately request the relevant author to do so in the next volume.

To see it, click the Microsoft Office button (or the “File” menu), and then click Word Options. Next, click “Proofing”. Make sure “Check grammar with spelling” is selected. Under “When correcting grammar in Word”, select the “Show readability statistics” check box. So when you have finished checking the spelling and grammar, you can choose to display information about the reading level of the document at the same time. The F-K output on your selected text appears as follows:

CRAFT Housekeeping

To be Arranged

Publications

Speaking

Workshops, Learning Circles, Exemplar Projects and Sauvage craft

Social Horizons

Links

News

Dr. Paul Wildman, CRAFT founder, speaks at the Woodford Folk Festival. Hear from the former Australian Chair of the Millennium Project and learn about the state of the future. You can catch him at the following times:

Dr. Paul Taylor also speaks at the Woodford Folk Festival on the Biochar Revolution. Learn about how waste mass can be used to repair soil, enhance food output, and produce energy. You can catch him on Saturday, 31st December 2011, 2:00pm at the Greenhouse.

CRAFT should not be confused with Craft Australia: "the peak national advocacy organisation for Australian contemporary craft and design". However, both organisations are on the same wavelength. This eZine sees itself as having a slightly overlapping role with Craft Australia and was intending to establish this link after the first three issues.

However, after serving the CRAFT community of Australia since 1971, Craft Australia is being defunded from November 2011. This decision was announced at the end of October as the outcome of a minor review of the key organisations that are supported by this agency. There are two arguments alleged for this decision: Craft Australia was too reliant on Government support and was not meeting the needs of the sector. Craft Australia has challenged both arguments.